Risk of Rain 2 will abandon side-scrolling in favour of third-person shooting

Bet you weren't expecting that.

Risk of Rain was a very good and extremely addictive side-scrolling shooter rogue-like, released back in 2013 when people weren't yet fed up with the genre. It's not the kind of game that screams out for a sequel, but Hopoo Games is making one anyway – only this time, the game will be entirely different.

That's because it'll be a 3D, third-person shooter. "Risk of Rain 2 is our first fully 3D project," the studio wrote on its blog. "We think that 3D allows for much deeper design spaces and more possibilities for cool gameplay. Feelings of scale and atmosphere are also much stronger. We are really happy with the core of Risk of Rain - and we’re finding it plays even better in 3D. It just won’t crash anymore."

The sequel is still very early in development, to the extent that basically nothing in the animated gifs embedded below can be considered final. While the devs shy away from saying much more, the next few Risk of Rain 2 devblogs will talk about some of the game's "awesome systems" which include a unified character system and "item proc chains".

The full blog post is over here, and naturally enough, no release date or even window has been specified.